Business Bullets - Marketing

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple years, you’ll know that online video has literally exploded, giving birth to the industry of Video Marketing.

The finger of blame can be pointed at a number of likely suspects; Facebook, YouTube, Google, faster mobile connections or we can just accept that as a generation, we just can’t stop consuming it. Why should you care? Where audiences congregate, opportunities to connect appear, and right now the stakes couldn’t be higher:

• Twitter: There are 500 million tweets sent each day. That’s 6000 tweets every second
• Facebook: Has an average of 8 billion daily video views
• YouTube: Almost 5 billion videos are watched every single day
• Instagram: Now has 400 million active users

The marketer’s challenge isn’t simply creating content and throwing it on the web. If it were that straight forward, then we’d all be successful publishers, uploading hours of unimaginative video to YouTube, then sitting back and watching the ‘views’ roll in. Fortunately, these days, online audiences are far more discerning, and unless you’re selling cat food, it’s worth remembering that not everyone enjoys watching other people’s pets make fools of themselves!

53% of YouTube’s videos have fewer than 500 views. About 30% have less than 100 views. Meanwhile, just 0.33% have more than 1 million views. (TubeMogul)

So if we’re all so obsessed by online video, then why do more than half of all YouTube videos have less than 500 views? Why have we become so selective about what content we allow to interrupt our time? Sure, we all prefer watching video versus reading pages of content, but this is simply a natural progression of how we consume online information. The sad truth is we’re all living busier lives, operating on multiple devices (laptops, tablets, smart phones, televisions…) and we’re literally bombarded with content all day long. Consequently, we now have much shorter attention spans and have learned to filter out or ignore any video content that doesn’t grab our interest within the first few seconds.

• 5% of viewers will stop watching a video after 1 minute and 60% by 2 minutes
• 80% of users recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days

We consume video in two ways, we either go out and find it or it finds us. Whether ‘information gathering’ or ‘interruption,’ content must cut through the clutter and capture our imagination. The more emotionally susceptible we are to the ‘message’ at that time, will determine how long we ‘allow permission’. Although Promotional Videos are getting shorter, overall duration is irrelevant if your audience isn’t predisposed to your message. If the timing, platform or message isn’t right, no one is watching.

There is no such thing as ‘creating a viral video’. Anything ‘going viral,’ a phrase, celebrity, product or video, is simply a result of either luck, hard work or perfect timing. However, if you can mastermind the perfect execution of all three of these components, your video content will stand a far greater chance of success.